Theever-increasing popularity of USB drives is causing problems. It is not justpromotional usb drives that are spreading like wildfire but a virus isspreading with them. Particular hotbeds of virus infection are universitycampuses. With the ease of portability of USB drives and the plug-in-and-playnature students find this the easiest way to transfer their work. However, thisfluid transport of computer data has caused more than 500 incidents reported injust 13 universities, this being half of the 27 universities approached forthis research. One of the major contributing factors to the virus attacks hasbeen that many university anti-virus security networks haven't been updatedafter being installed resulting in them being unable to prevent this virus frominfecting their computers. It is worrying that USB drives can carry viruses butit is more worrying that if university computers can be infected then personalcomputers must also be in danger.

                                      What exactly dothese viruses do?

 Themain culprit of these outbreaks is a virus called ?autorun?. When a USB flashdrive is infected with this virus and is inserted into a USB drive of anothercomputer the virus reproduces itself within the new system. The only noticeablesigns of infection have been reported to be minor such as the computer runningslowly but the serious nature of the virus can't be seen. The virus can emaildata saved on an infected computer to other users and it can also allow otherviruses to attack the computer it has infected. It has even been reported thatin one case the virus couldn't be destroyed until the computer had beendisassembled!

 Theworst thing about this autorun virus is that there is no way of telling if aninfected computer's data has been stolen. If highly confidential informationfrom such organisations as universities are vulnerable then other organisationsare liable to the threat of infection. Before we get carried away about acomputer virus pandemic USB drives are most popular amongst the studentpopulation and as a result Universities are naturally the most vulnerable tovirus infections via USB drives.

 Inthe University of Tokyo before the viruswas discovered computers didn't have antivirus software installed because theadministrators believed that the computers were not at risk because they werenot connected to the Internet.

 The Solution

 Thesolution is not preventing the use of branded USB flashdrives. This will not and should not happen. As students and othersbecome aware of the risk of using USB devices virus infections will decreasewhilst computer administrators will take more care in protecting theirnetworks. Using USB drives is a fantastically easy and efficient way totransport computer data and with the price of USB drives continuing to fallthey are here to stay and consequently we will only be seeing an increase inpopularity of flash drives in the future.